Thomas J. Leeper

I am a behavioral scientist and R hacker working on experimental, survey, and computational approaches for understanding social and political phenomena. My research has focused on comparative public opinion, the political psychology of information seeking and attitude change, survey-experimental methodology, and applications of the R statistical programming language. My personal open source projects are described on my GitHub profile.

Prior to that, I was a Postdoc in the Institut for Statskundskab (Department of Political Science) at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, where I studied interactions between political parties and public opinion. I received my MA and PhD from the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, where I was a graduate fellow at the Institute for Policy Research and served as founding coordinator of the Northwestern Political Science Research Lab (PSRL). My PhD dissertation focused on incorporating information choice and over-time dynamics into the study of political communication and opinion formation. A native of Minnesota, I previously studied at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities with a BA magna cum laude with Distinction in Political Science and Global Studies.